Human-Robot Dichotomy

This paper belongs to the area of roboethics and responsible robotics. It discusses the conceptual and practical separation of humans and robots in designing and implementing robots into real-world environments. We argue here that humans are often seen as a component that is only optional in design thinking, and in some cases even an obstacle to the successful robot performance. Such an approach may vary from viewing humans as a factor that does not belong to the robotics domain, through attempts to ‘adjust’ humans to robot requirements, to the overall replacement of humans with robots. Such separation or exclusion of humans poses serious ethical challenges, including the very exclusion of ethics from our thinking about robots

A Value-Sensitive Design Approach to Intelligent Agents

This chapter proposed a novel design methodology called Value-Sensitive Design and its potential application to the field of artificial intelligence research and design. It discusses the imperatives in adopting a design philosophy that embeds values into the design of artificial agents at the early stages of AI development. Because of the high risk stakes in the unmitigated design of artificial agents, this chapter proposes that even though VSD may turn out to be a less-than-optimal design methodology, it currently provides a framework that has the potential to embed stakeholder values and incorporate current design methods. The reader should begin to take away the importance of a proactive design approach to intelligent agents

Assistive technology design and development for acceptable robotics companions for ageing years

© 2013 Farshid Amirabdollahian et al., licensee Versita Sp. z o. o. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author.A new stream of research and development responds to changes in life expectancy across the world. It includes technologies which enhance well-being of individuals, specifically for older people. The ACCOMPANY project focuses on home companion technologies and issues surrounding technology development for assistive purposes. The project responds to some overlooked aspects of technology design, divided into multiple areas such as empathic and social human-robot interaction, robot learning and memory visualisation, and monitoring persons’ activities at home. To bring these aspects together, a dedicated task is identified to ensure technological integration of these multiple approaches on an existing robotic platform, Care-O-Bot®3 in the context of a smart-home environment utilising a multitude of sensor arrays. Formative and summative evaluation cycles are then used to assess the emerging prototype towards identifying acceptable behaviours and roles for the robot, for example role as a butler or a trainer, while also comparing user requirements to achieved progress. In a novel approach, the project considers ethical concerns and by highlighting principles such as autonomy, independence, enablement, safety and privacy, it embarks on providing a discussion medium where user views on these principles and the existing tension between some of these principles, for example tension between privacy and autonomy over safety, can be captured and considered in design cycles and throughout project developmentsPeer reviewe

Beyond Speculative Robot Ethics

In this article we develop a dialogue model for robot technology experts and designated users to discuss visions on the future of robotics in long-term care. Our vision assessment study aims for more distinguished and more informed visions on future robots. Surprisingly, our experiment also lead to some promising co-designed robot concepts in which jointly articulated moral guidelines are embedded. With our model we think to have designed an interesting response on a recent call for a less speculative ethics of technology by encouraging discussions about the quality of positive and negative visions on the future of robotics.

Sensor System for Rescue Robots

A majority of rescue worker fatalities are a result of on-scene responses. Existing technologies help assist the first responders in scenarios of no light, and there even exist robots that can navigate radioactive areas. However, none are able to be both quickly deployable and enter hard to reach or unsafe areas in an emergency event such as an earthquake or storm that damages a structure. In this project we created a sensor platform system to augment existing robotic solutions so that rescue workers can search for people in danger while avoiding preventable injury or death and saving time and resources. Our results showed that we were able to map out a 2D map of the room with updates for robot motion on a display while also showing a live thermal image in front of the system. The system is also capable of taking a digital picture from a triggering event and then displaying it on the computer screen. We discovered that data transfer plays a huge role in making different programs like Arduino and Processing interact with each other. Consequently, this needs to be accounted for when improving our project. In particular our project is wired right now but should deliver data wirelessly to be of any practical use. Furthermore, we dipped our feet into SLAM technologies and if our project were to become autonomous, more research into the algorithms would make this autonomy feasible

The moral psychology of Value Sensitive Design: the methodological issues of moral intuitions for responsible innovation

This paper argues that although moral intuitions are insufficient for making judgments on new technological innovations, they maintain great utility for informing responsible innovation. To do this, this paper employs the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology as an illustrative example of how stakeholder values can be better distilled to inform responsible innovation. Further, it is argued that moral intuitions are necessary for determining stakeholder values required for the design of responsible technologies. This argument is supported by the claim that the moral intuitions of stakeholders allow designers to conceptualize stakeholder values and incorporate them into the early phases of design. It is concluded that design-for-values (DFV) frameworks like the VSD methodology can remain potent if developers adopt heuristic tools to diminish the influence of cognitive biases thus strengthening the reliability of moral intuitions

Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph

Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade